As the day wore on and information still failed to flow in from the field, the Romney campaign was flying blind. Instead of using Orca's vaunted analytics to steer their course, Centinello and the rest of Romney's team had no solid data on how to target late voters, other than what they heard from the media. Meanwhile, volunteers like Ekdahl could do nothing but vote themselves and go home.

While the hot line was too overwhelmed to be of much use, the source said the program itself still proved a smashing success. Using the submitted codes, the campaign was able to clean 1.6 million voters from the call lists they distributed to canvassers that afternoon, making those lists 25 percent shorter on average.
In Indiana, Houdini was especially critical: Volunteers reported so many voter codes that the campaign was able to cut the afternoon call list in half, the source said. Obama eventually won the Hoosier State by just 25,000 votes.
Of course, the Houdini program had its limits, not least of which was that it depended on volunteers staying inside polling stations to record voter names, which not every state allows. Lags in reporting meant canvassers still ended up contacting some voters who had cast their ballots after the call list was revised and distributed in the afternoon. And the hot line's problems proved that as campaigns become more tech-savvy, low-tech backup plans become increasingly important.
Polls confirm that the Obama get-out-the-vote team out-hustled John McCain in the closing days of the race. Twenty-eight percent of likely voters in a Nov. 3 ABC News/Washington Post poll said the Obama campaign had contacted them in the past week, compared with 22 percent for McCain.
In swing states where McCain had less robust field operations, that disparity was even wider. In Virginia, 50 percent of voters told exit pollsters that the Obama campaign contacted them over the course of the general election, while 38 percent said the same about the McCain team. In Indiana, Obama reached 37 percent of voters to McCain's 22 percent.
Obama's organizational advantage might have helped drive a 2.6 percent increase [PDF] in Democratic turnout over 2004. Republican turnout, meanwhile, dipped by 1.3 percentage points.

They had failovers and Plan Bs and Cs. They got their information from the field, they used Houdini to analyze it, and it helped tremendously. They didn't have problems using the actual program, and didn't have anything like the login credentials problem that plagued Orca even when was online. So even though they had to do a lot of manual entry instead of through the special high-speed pipe, they still put Houdini to use and got a lot of results.
And that was in 2008, when they were in basically the same situation as Romney's campaign. No time to fully develop the system, just a few months of furious work, and on election day the high-speed automated data entry system was knocked out. But because the campaign was being run well, it wasn't the complete disaster that Orca was.

Romney's team had an almost perfect history lesson to learn from when designing their own vote tracking system. And not only did they repeat one of the biggest mistakes (not ensuring a fat enough data pipe), they made a whole slew of new mistakes by not having the same redundancy and contingency plans Obama's team had back then. After all their talk about how Orca was so superior to Obama's tech, it proved to be inferior to the first version from four years ago. Why? Because of inferior management and an apparent inability to learn from other people's example (even other people's mistakes).
In comparison, Obama's tech team this time around had a much improved system that worked beautifully despite the natural disaster in the northeast. They had the entire system duplicated on a separate network halfway across the country just in case (turned out not to need it). And they made sure to keep the tubes flowing so they didn't repeat the problems of 2008.

Maybe it's a good thing we have a "community organizer" leading us instead of "America's CEO."

He's known as a foreign policy hawk, however (that was actually his selling point in 2004), so he seems fairly natural for the job. I'm kind of bummed about Susan Rice, if only because she's being hung out to dry on trumped up charges that she said things that weren't true even though at the time she said them those things were vetted by the DNI and the CIA, and hadn't been changed by either the State Dept or the White House. Score one for political brinkmanship, I guess._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

I don't know anything about her qualifications, but the way that played out was really annoying. You know if she had said, "oh, we know it's such-and-such a terrorist group ", they would have complained she was giving out secret info. They were just determined there had to be a scandal, so they made one up._________________aka: neverscared!

Well, the Senate actually passed something, though it just punted the sequestration question down the road several weeks. And the House gets to vote on it today.

At least watching the reactions of different news agencies has been fun...

EDIT: Somewhat amazingly, the House passed it, with no alterations. Two months to figure out sequestration (hurray...)_________________“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

THANK GOD. Though I'm not in california, and I would have preferred something more sweeping (CAN WE PLEASE HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE), I'm still pleased with the law-because without it, finding health care for my fiance in the future is going to be a fucking Sisyphean task, unless I get a employer that provides for the both of us.

(I do wish to say that Virginia Tech is awesome, in that it allows me to define a 'life parter' and buy insurance from them at the wife/husband rate, even if we aren't legally married yet. Because otherwise we'd be screeeewwwed.)_________________"No, but evil is still being --Is having reason-- Being reasonable! Mousie understands? Is always being reason. Is punishing world for not being... Like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason."
-Ed, from Digger